The Water Clock

5

The landscape slipped by Humph’s cab: a monochrome sea as flat as an ancient mariner’s nightmare. In one field of black earth a wild horse stood, its head and neck just clear of the blanket of ground mist. A disembodied mythical animal floating over an invisible land. Telegraph poles stood at crazy angles in the deep black peat – just scratching the low white sky above.

Humph ate a sandwich with one hand while guiding the cab out to Little Ouse with the other: a procedure not so much reminiscent of steering as tacking. He ate with delicate and exaggerated care. He was a finicky eater. As he always said, the problem was his hormones. Dryden imagined they were big hormones with Ipswich Town sweatshirts.

They found themselves running beside the frozen River Lark. At the spot where the car had been ditched they pulled up by the yellow and black scene-of-crime tape where a solitary PC stood guard. He looked too young to be out on his own let alone in a police uniform.

Dryden wound the window right down. ‘Any developments, Inspector?’

Humph smirked. They had few shared pastimes but baiting police constables was one of them.

The copper ignored him.

‘I understand the culprits may be armed and still in the area?’ This was news to the constabulary. The PC produced a two-way radio and walked off to check out in private how it worked.

Humph drove away before Dryden could do any more harm. They sped past the Five Miles from Anywhere – closed on winter evenings, its beer garden was full of picnic tables dripping in the mist.

A mile downstream was the site of an old cut used by the potato barges in the 1880s, similar to the one in which PK 122 was moored but much larger. The dock was being redeveloped as a marina. Building work had begun in the late summer and as they drove past Dryden could see lights burning in one of the Swedish-style chalets built to stand on wooden piles above the moorings. The river beyond was blocked by a pontoon above which a single-track bridge was being constructed to provide car access to the marina from the north.

Dryden told Humph to park up. A wrought-iron arch over the entrance spelt out the words: Feltwell Marina.

As Dryden stood listening for signs of life a voice made him jump: ‘Can I help?’ A body followed in the gathering gloom. The caretaker had seen him coming.

‘Saw the lights,’ said Dryden by way of explanation. Building work ahead of the big freeze had left the marina’s yard with half a dozen deep trenches criss-crossing the site.

The caretaker nodded. He was big and broad and dressed like a lumberjack. He had a ridiculous fur hat with ear-flaps tied up under his chin. Dryden would have laughed, but then he was big and broad and dressed like a lumberjack.

Dryden was always disappointed at his inability to intimidate. At six foot three, in the cavernous black overcoat, he felt he might just occasionally demand some respect. But the lumberjack didn’t look very impressed.

‘I just wondered,’ said Dryden, weakly. Any news about the car they got out of the river?’

‘Car?’

There was a long silence in which the sound of cogs could be heard turning. Was that a thought crossing his mind?

‘Fuck off,’ said the caretaker and whistled. An Alsatian dog bounded into the light trailing a line of dribble any rabies victim would have been proud of. Dryden’s guts dissolved and the surge of panic was so strong he couldn’t move his legs. With what looked like exaggerated calm he flipped open a laminated wallet containing a press card, which failed to impress the dog. Then again it was a decade old, and someone else’s.

‘Philip Dryden. The Crow’

‘Fuck off,’ said the caretaker. It didn’t count as repetition because it was at least an octave lower and a lot louder.

Dryden fucked off. The last thing he saw was a half-finished sign propped up against the marina’s prospective site office. ‘Feltwell Anchor Marina opens: April 1’. Work on the bridge would not take as long, but the river would be blocked for several months at least. But for the kids, and the ice, the Lark victim would have stayed undiscovered into the spring.

‘Local knowledge,’ said Dryden to nobody, fishing in the pockets and producing a packet of mushrooms which he munched as they swept on through the gloom.

The village of Little Ouse lay at the end of a three-mile drove – a long, dispiriting ride across the peatlands on a track constructed of slabs of concrete laid inexpertly heel-to-toe. It had been a soft drove until the war, when the concrete had been laid by the Ministry of Production to speed the supply of vegetables to London. The corrugated surface played a soundtrack back to drivers – a kind of dismal rumbling background beat.

Two rows of brick tied cottages formed what was once the heart of the village. They stood in the lee of the high river bank. A tortured cast-iron bridge crossed the Lark. A home-made wooden sign hung from its railing in the gloom of a winter’s dusk: At Your Own Risk’. The church of St John, rebuilt by the Victorians, was demure and neat in contrast to the monumental vicarage, a neo-Gothic classic in damp red brick, which stood beside it in the same stand of tall pines. Much of the odious decoration was hidden beneath a facade of ivy. Like most poor Victorian buildings it was dominated by a minor feature, the front porch – a stone portico supported by carved caryatids of two clerics with bishops’ crooks.

They pulled up and Humph killed the engine. He was asleep before the sound died.

The light was gone from the day and the dusk was violet except for the white ice on the trees. The vicarage loomed over them, some of the windows lighted. Two men came out and made their way to a woodstore beside the church, returning laden with logs for a fire. Beneath the portico they stopped to chat to a figure lost in the gloom. Then they were gone, but the figure lingered. The wind whispered through the pines. A full minute passed before the Reverend John Tavanter stepped out into what was left of the day.

He wore a heavy black overcoat but nothing on his head, which was globe-like and radiated intelligence. Dryden guessed he was in his mid sixties, a rounded, almost sensual figure with the dreamy childish features of a poet. A teetotal Dylan Thomas. He exuded a comfortable confidence, although his hands fluttered in a minor betrayal of something less assured.

He saw Dryden, spread his hands in a blessing, and looked to the sky. ‘Snow soon,’ he said, in a pulpit voice.

Dryden slammed the cab door and enjoyed the triple echo. They walked towards the church. They’d met before over the previous two years in a depressing round of parishioners’ deaths, farm accidents, and petty vandalism in the parish – and finally at his own mother’s funeral. St John’s at Little Ouse was the least vibrant of Tavanter’s six churches, the solitary Sunday service drawing a congregation of twenty, limping in from outlying farms.

Some, most perhaps, knew the story of the desolation of St John’s. In small communities sexual scandal has a half-life as long and corrosive as radium. Tavanter had come to St John’s, his first parish, from Oxford in the spring of 1965. The obstacles in his modernizing path were formidable – the nagging poverty of his congregation and their almost pagan need for a style of religion he could not condone, let alone deliver. He had arrived with ideas of social mobility then popular in his theological college. He found a congregation which wanted a medieval preacher to take up residence in the manse with a suitable wife. They suspected his motives and eventually, worse still, his morals. For years they despised him while he fought to love them without hatred.

He blamed himself for hiding the truth. So, on Advent Sunday 1975, a bright day full of unforgettable yellow sunlight which managed to flatten a landscape already steamrollered by nature, he announced from the pulpit that he was gay. It was a life-defining moment and one he replayed with pride on the video tape that was his memory. In a single practised sentence he gained the authority he deserved, and lost a congregation. At the end of the sermon the hymn had been Bunyan’s ‘To Be a Pilgrim’. He had sung it alone.

They drove him out: not in the hail of earth and invective that would have been his punishment a century before, but by indifference and malice. He preached to an empty church for six months. On saints’ days they would gather within sight of St John’s across the peat fields to pray. He watched them, his vestments blowing uselessly in the wind, while they raised their voices in hymn. He left within a year after a pauper’s funeral which he had briefly prayed might be his own.

It was God or chance that arranged the next episode in John Tavanter’s life. By then he did not care if it was someone else’s God. He joined a team ministry in Stepney, in London’s East End, where he helped the poor who asked no questions. In 1983 he used his savings to buy a plot of land on the canal bank beside St Barnabas’s Church so that a youth club could be added to the Victorian church hall. It cost him £26,000: the land was of little value to anyone else.

Within a month the diocese had decided to close St Barnabas and merge two congregations at a new church half a mile away. Developers wanted the land for executive housing – the gentrification of the inner city was then beginning to gather pace. The only obstacle was Tavanter’s half acre. He sold for £750,000.

When it came it was a delicious moment. The solicitors handed over the cheque in their wood-panelled offices in Bow High Street. Cold rain ran in rivulets down the fake mullioned window panes.

£750,000.

The figure hung in the air despite the weight of its astonishing implications. He returned to Cambridge and founded a centre for the care of terminally ill patients with AIDS. He called it, in one of many acts of retribution, the St John’s Centre. In return for transferring ownership of the hospice and its financing foundation to the local diocese he was appointed team vicar for a group of six Fen parishes, based at the vicarage of St John’s. He used the rambling building as a centre for the carers of AIDS patients, in need of somewhere to escape the pressures of the deathbed.

It was a victory and John Tavanter spent most of the rest of his life trying not to glory in it. Those parishioners who remembered him treated him like a ghost.

Dryden and Tavanter liked each other in that kind of instant superficial way which can be the first step in a long friendship. Tavanter saw in the reporter a fellow outsider, someone who watched life as a spectator, a game devised for ordinary, normal people. Dryden recognized in Tavanter the wry attitude of someone estranged from society, and not entirely unhappy with the arrangement. When his mother died he chose Little Ouse for the burial. Tavanter had been matter-of-fact, helpful and humane.

They walked to St John’s in silence. In the porch a single electric light bulb shone on a squalid scene: cigarette butts, a few bottles of cider, two condoms and a syringe, in a nest of old clothing and newspaper.

‘Kids,’ said Tavanter, nudging the nest with his foot. ‘The syringe is for show. But one day it won’t be.’ He flicked an imaginary strand of hair from his forehead, a constant mannerism which reminded nobody of the thick blond hair of which he had once been sinfully proud.

‘Place must have changed,’ said Dryden, expertly leading his witness on.

Tavanter was aware of the reporter’s skills but trusted him: in the past they had talked privately about stories and the result had been sympathetic and intelligent.

‘Some. About two centuries in forty years. When I first came to St John’s they didn’t have teenagers. They certainly didn’t look like teenagers – they had the same windblown faces and hand-me-down clothes as their parents. But they dreamed then about the same mundane things: owning a TV, running a car, sex and marriage. I don’t think I married a woman at St John’s who didn’t turn out to be pregnant at the altar.’

‘Now…?’

He shrugged and gave Dryden a first, direct look. His eyes were beautiful, even Dryden could see that, a turtle-dove grey with enough depth for a drowning. Tavanter unlocked his church. St John’s was Edwardian, built on an earlier medieval site. The church interior was as neat and cold as a crypt.

They passed into the vestry and out into the churchyard. This had survived the Edwardian construction and the rebuilding of 1947. The yew tree and a spectacular vine were much older than the church and several of the headstones reached back into the sixteenth century. His mother’s headstone stood by an old rubble wall. He deftly replaced the lilies with the fresh bunch he had brought, and, as always, took a pebble he’d collected by the river from his pocket and set it on the stone. He didn’t pause to remember but followed Tavanter through a gap in the hedge into a small enclosure full of cheap, standard headstones. Some graves were unmarked and others carried simple wooden crosses. The grass was unkempt and there were no flowers. With the dusk a gentle fall of snow had begun and was peppering the ground. An owl hooted ridiculously like a sound effect from a TV thriller.

They laughed, relieving the tension. ‘Paupers’ graveyard,’ explained Tavanter, taking a deep breath of ice-cold air. ‘Rather a lot of them, I’m afraid. As you can see someone has taken exception to them.’

Most of the stones had been badly damaged – presumably with something heavy wielded by someone determined. Few had survived intact, most were split in two, the fragments scattered in the frosty grass.

‘Why the publicity?’ The radio report would have come from police calls. It was rare for them to advertise vandalism.

‘Not my choice. Police think I should have told them about what was going on in the porch. They think publicity will scare them off. I told ‘em that was why the kids did it. To get noticed.’

‘This is the first…’

‘Oh yes. Nothing like this before.’

Dryden bent down and matched some of the broken stone shards to their disfigured headstones. Jack Gotobed 1823–1860. Martha Jane Elliot 1891–1976. Peter Noah Jones 1901–1964. Marjorie Phyllis Carter 1900–1972.

He felt the corrupt damp rising from the ground. He shuffled his feet. ‘Any relatives still around?’

‘Hardly. Rural depopulation. The last burial here was in the 1980s. Still consecrated ground, of course. Anyway, you don’t ask questions about relatives out here. Old joke but it’s true. When they ran a school here in the 1930s there were four family names on the register and twenty-eight children. They have family trees – they just don’t have any branches on them.’

They laughed together, the sound crackling in the frosty air.

‘Cost? Repair?’

‘Don’t think we’ll bother.’ Tavanter folded his hands inside his overcoat in a fluid movement which spoke of a lifetime in vestments. ‘Tidy up perhaps. I might get the tops of the stones rounded off. I’ll make a point of popping in over the next few weeks, leaving the lights on, generating some activity. But it won’t fool anyone. We might get a security light – but in the end it’ll make no difference.’

‘Any fears for the rest of the church?’

Tavanter sighed. ‘I can’t tell you what to write, Dryden, but why give ‘em ideas? It’s totally vulnerable of course. There’s six churches in the circuit I cover – to provide security for all would wipe out our income. And they’re only churches – stone and mortar – we try to concentrate our resources on the people. They could take the windows out I suppose, although they’re meshed. If they got in there’s arson, but they won’t push their luck that far.’

‘Kids then, you reckon?’

Tavanter gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘It’s not the only theory, as I am sure you’ve guessed. The police consider the sanctuary here at St John’s a hotbed of perverts. Buggery and vandalism – what’s the difference, eh?’

‘Where there’s kids there’s parents.’

Tavanter nodded, enjoying himself. ‘On the whole they come under the heading of what I think our American cousins call white trash. Poor white trash.’

Dryden raised his eyebrows in mock shock.

‘We’re all allowed our prejudices,’ said Tavanter, buttoning his overcoat to his neck.

They stood awhile in what had become the night. The only light came from the thick frost now underfoot. They turned together and retraced their black footsteps etched out on the grass.

Dryden stopped before the gap in the hedge that led back into the main graveyard and put a finger to his lips. He pointed down to a track of footsteps which had come out of the trees, shadowing their own to the paupers’ graveyard, but stopping short by the hedge. In the frost a cigarette butt smouldered. They heard a door open somewhere across the fields, letting the sound of a TV drift on the air. A dog barked and stopped when a door slammed.

‘Kids,’ said Tavanter, like a mantra.